Tim Berners-Lee gave a talk at the TED2009 conference on linked data — one of the newest and most interesting ideas to emerge from efforts to realize the Semantic Web vision.

Here’s a summary of Sir Berners-Lee’s from a post by Gigaom, Highlights from TED: Tim Berners-Lee, Pattie Maes, Jacek Utko. I’m looking forward to being able to see his talk online soon.

“Founder of the web Tim Berners-Lee spoke of the next grassroots communication movement he wants to start: linked data. Much in the way his development of the web stemmed out of the frustrations of brilliant people working in silos, he is frustrated that the data of the world is shut apart in offline databases.

Berners-Lee wants raw data to come online so that it can be related to each other and applied together for multidisciplinary purposes, like combining genomics data and protein data to try to cure Alzheimer’s. He urged “raw data now,” and an end to “hugging your data” — i.e. keeping it private — until you can make a beautiful web site for it.

Berners-Lee said his dream is already on its way to becoming a reality, but that it will require a format for tagging data and understanding relationships between different pieces of it in order for a search to turn up something meaningful. Some current efforts are dbpedia, a project aimed at extracting structured information from Wikipedia, and OpenStreetMap, an editable map of the world. He really wants President Obama, who has promised to conduct government transparently online, to post linked data online.”

You can see the slides that TBL used on the W3C site.

The BBC broadcast an interview with Tim-Berners Lee on the future of the Internet”. In the interview he talk about the linking open data paradigm. On a related note, MIT recently announced that Tim has been named the 3Com Founders Professor of Engineering in the School of Engineering, with a joint appointment in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.